by Evan Long

e-mail: evanlong ATSYMBOL xmail PERIOD net
website: http://www.xmail.net/evanlong/

There's been discussion over whether or not accused Columbine attackers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold coded a level of the video game, Doom, to resemble the high school they attended and that, on April 20, 1999, they were implicated in having shot to pieces.

According to an article by Barbara Mikkelson of the Snopes web site, a claim had surfaced on the internet in 1999 that

"One of the boys who murdered his classmates at Columbine High School prepared by designing new computer game levels that resembled his school and peopling them with representations of his classmates."

The article in which this is covered is titled, "The Harris Levels", and in it, Mikkelson labels the claim,

"False."

In the years since the official pronouncement that the conveniently suicided Harris and Klebold acted one hundred percent alone in planning and perpetrating the attack on the high school, law enforcement has been pressured by surviving family members and their supporters to release approximately thirty thousand pages of documents created as part of the government "investigation" of the attack, while yet more documents remain under the government's lock and key.

In reference to the Doom levels, on page 7,043 of the release called 11,000 Pages of Investigative Files (JC-001-007043), then-CHS student David Proctor, who had played the game with the killers via modem, was reported to have told government "investigators"

"that earlier this year [1999] Harris had told him he designed a level of Doom that was Columbine High School."

The Mikkelson article, last updated in 2005, would therefore be incorrect on a major point of fact.

What's perhaps most noteworthy about it, however, is that, Proctor's assertion aside, to make the kind of statement she made, Mikkelson undertook the logical impossibility of proving the negative in an incompletely known system.

In other words, even if we didn't have access to the record of Proctor's alleged statement, we could still say that Harris and Klebold might have programmed a level of Doom that resembled CHS and unless someone could present a record of every computer file ever produced, it's logically impossible to state with one hundred percent certainty that they didn't.

This kind of flawed analysis is a weak limb for a would-be high-profile debunking web site to have gone out on, so perhaps there was an ulterior motive for the production of the piece.

If there was, perhaps it's to be found in statements within it such as

"[T]here's not much to it, really",

"There's no need to look for any more horror"

and

"There is no fathoming the heart of the Devil".

Statements like these, as well as the more subtle implication that if Harris' CHS Doom levels didn't make it into the publicly available repositories of his other files such as that of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia any idiot can edit, they truly must not exist, serve to communicate the impression that to venture beyond the official story of the attack is distinctly verboten.

To follow these suggestions would perhaps mean that one would never read the government documents to find that dozens of ear- and eyewitnesses were alleged to have reported up to ten or more additional attackers at CHS, including an adult in his 30's as well as current and former CHS students, some of whom some of the witnesses were able to name by name.

It would also perhaps mean that one would never discover that the police and FBI "investigation" of the attack seems to have consisted mainly of subjecting these witnesses to repeated reinterviews during which they were actively pressured to change their statements.

In any case, it is entirely within our power now to take it upon ourselves to decisively and forcefully reject inaccurate and potentially misleading articles like "The Harris Levels" and to find out more about the real events of and surrounding the attack on Columbine.